I’ve been researching this topic intensively over the past couple days and feel as though if I don’t type a post on it today, all my work shall be for nought, as my browser is piling up with tabs at a pace sufficient to prevent me from typing this post after today.

No doubt this export of grain when there should have been imports took place due to lack of sufficient industrialization -anecdotally, despite British rule, it was still difficult for Indians to acquire European capital. The debt payments to Britain, which hurt, but did not totally prevent, equalization of Indian with world grain prices via inflow of specie, something essential to prevent some grim humor, also couldn’t have helped. Aid to the poor for the whole of India was generally less than half that for the U.K. in nominal currency, despite the latter having less than a sixth of the population of the former. And the vast majority of the British famine aid was spent not on actually delivering any food, but on building railroads. And, indeed, the Indian famines were perfectly soluble by a sufficient amount of British aid; the main victims of the famine were those unemployed by lack of employment opportunities to work the land or to supply those refocusing their purchases on consumption of foodgrains with their goods and services. This manifested itself as both a labor supply shock due to a rising reservation wage and a labor demand shock due to reduced nominal demand for farm and artisan labor.

The stupidity of wasting food by making work a requirement for receiving welfare in order to prevent sloth does not need to be pointed out, of course. Especially in the 1876-9 famine, British famine aid was marked by stupidity.

Now, how, exactly, would Britain have been able to prevent the famines that afflicted India during the late 19th century? Firstly, ban food exports. That would have kept enough food in the country to save millions of lives without even much of an effort on Britain’s part. But, to prevent that food from being consumed solely by the unfamished, Britain needed to do much more than just ban food exports; prices would have still skyrocketed even with this action due to internal crop failure. Consumption-side cash grants to the unemployed might have been disastrous and counterproductive, as would have price controls, which, while raising affordability of food for the poor, would have resulted in shortages (in the economist’s sense). What needs to be understood is that the demand for food in India was highly price-insensitive -the nominal revenue of able producers strongly spiked with price increases resulting from food supply shocks. The price sensitivity of Indian food supply is less clear. What was needed was to pay more producers to import grain into the famished provinces to sell at a price level set by the British government. This supply-side subsidy would have successfully lowered prices and prevented Indian famines by lowering producers’ marginal cost.

A supply and demand graph of a typical late 19th century Indian famine.

Obviously, structural changes, especially superior institutions, greater market integration, and faster industrialization, would have been superior to all this. But the conditions were not yet ripe for massive outsourcing and offshoring to be profitable for British business and the British government. Had they been, it would have led to changing government policy to promote export-led industrialization and economic development, as actually happened in Puerto Rico and other territories imperialist powers held on to in the age of independence from imperialism.

How does one rank the cruelty of these famines in comparison to those of the Communists? I believe that, overall, the British famines in India were comparable to those of Stalin in the southern Soviet Union. While Stalin did more for the Soviet Union than the British did for India (the Soviet economy was roughly twice the size of that of India at Indian independence; they were roughly comparable in size when Stalin came to power), and the famines under him were smaller than those of British India terms of pure human cost, the famines under Stalin did end up killing a larger proportion of the population in the affected areas than those under the British Empire (with exceptions in the 18th century). Stalin does get a demerit for covering up the famines going on under him in order to avoid embarrassment, while the British at no point did anything of the sort. The 1959-61 famine of Mao, meanwhile, was completely inexcusable; it took place during the early phases of the Green Revolution, when China could have imported millions of tons of grain, it took place over a background of declining mortality since the founding of the PRC, it was covered up by Mao in order to avoid embarrassment, and it was partly caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which should have received special scrutiny of its results from the Chinese leadership, not the cover-up of its failures that it did. Those of Hitler were certainly worse, if not in raw human cost, then in intent. Those of Pol Pot, imperial Japan, and Kim Jong-Il deserve their own special place in hell.

The Author

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